Seen, Felt, Heard

To all the stories
that have yet
to be seen,
felt and heard ;
And to all the people
who help us see them,
feel them and hear them.

In life we all want to be seen, felt and heard. There is nothing more discouraging than the feeling of having no voice. That there is no place for us to be seen, felt and heard. That there is no place for us to be who we are. To leave an imprint. Not because of our achievements. Because of our little contribution to this world which is the result of our self, our actions, our beliefs and our uniqueness. I was not seen, felt and heard for many, many years of my life. Surely, I am still not seen, felt and heard by certain people and communities I might interact with in different aspects of my life. Sometimes, I am not even seen, felt or heard by my own parents, by other members of my family or by some of my friends. I love them all very much. They love me back with the same intensity or more. When something keeps us apart, it is because of the dissimilarity of our experiences and the disconnect that this creates between how we see life and how we see each other.

We get used to living with this lack of understanding and lack of perspective between our world view and others’. We assume it is just another one of those things in life we can’t explain and that will always remain unseen, unfelt and unheard. Some embark on a life-long soul-searching journey. Others legitimately prefer to stop asking questions in such a way and just live life as it is without delving much deeper.

Myself, I still feel challenged with this anguish and I have many existential questions. Over the years, I just got a bit better at living with this strangeness. I made it part of who I am. I embraced who I was, the choices I had made in life and broke away from the herd. A decision that resulted in a greater feeling of not being seen, felt and heard.

However, there is one thing that changed everything for me: journalism and my years as an international correspondent in Asia.

Before that, there was something else that had already sank in when I was a child: the way my grandma used to read the newspaper every single day. She was always the first one in the house to wake up. My Grandad was always very lazy in the mornings. He was a hard-working man, but he was a night owl, not an early bird. Sometimes, his morning laziness upset us, other times it made us laugh. This was part of who he was. I remember very well how we all saw him, felt him and heard him.

Myself, since I was sleeping over at my Grandparents’ only on weekends, I would wake up when I would wake up. Before my grandad for sure, and some time after my grandma. On these mornings, the first thing I used to see was my grandma quietly seating in her usual spot at the dining table in the living room reading the newspaper. The Mediterranean sun rising, permeating the room, leaving a warm impression on everything around us.

With her prescription glasses on, she would delicately grab her old sewing scissors and carefully cut out any news article she found interesting, one by one. Then, she would give them to my mom, for her to read. There was no mainstream Internet yet back then. It was in the late 80s and early 90s. So this was how they shared the news with each other. At the same time my mom would give my grandma other articles she may have found interesting. My Mom and grandma agreed to always buy two different newspapers so that they could exchange stories from different sources. They carefully read these articles and then called each other to discuss their views and impressions of the life of others and the impact that this was having on the world and ultimately on our lives.

Later on, I found out that my grandma was also sending by post regular news digests to her daughter and son, who at the time were living in Guatemala and the U.S., respectively.

I am still not very sure of how I got into journalism myself. I have a B.A. in Communication and Media Studies. Journalism was part of the curriculum but not the main subject since I was not pursuing a degree in journalism. I was drawn into it. My intuition told me to follow it. One of my favourite tasks was writing life sketches. I was fascinated by this exercise that sparks your curiosity and fosters the difficult skill of observation. I still practise it regularly. It basically consists of paying attention to everything around you and writing about it. The effort comes not from chasing big stories, but from paying attention to details. In other words, to see, feel and hear what is not seen, felt and heard. How beautiful is that!

The very first life sketch that I wrote described a group of four women that I used to see every single day on my way to university They used to stand on the same corner and talk. I never found out what they talk about and for how long; nor who they were. The beauty of the life sketch exercise is to pay attention to details and use the imagination to describe it. To put into words the unknown by seeing, feeling and hearing a chosen piece of reality.

I was overcome by a startling realisation: I have always been intensely curious about the lives of others. When I was a child, my imagination made me believe I had special powers and this is how I was able to see what was unseen by others. To my more rational and mature adult mind, this magic made me fall in love with storytelling.

When I was working in Asia as a freelance international correspondent, I felt I was carrying a huge responsibility on my shoulders: being the voice of others. A responsibility that, to be honest, never left me. I took it very seriously. During my first year in Asia, I spent nights researching the realities of every single country in Asia. Facts, anecdotes, political systems, cultures, ethnic groups, languages. I had not embraced new technologies as much yet. It was early 2006 and smartphones were not in the game as they are nowadays. Instead, I created my own country cards, full of very well-organized handwritten notes that captured the realities that were unknown to my 22 year old young European self.

I fell in love with it. Asian affairs became my school of life. Everything I wrote about challenged me. It questioned every single part of my young being. Until I accepted that the more I learnt about other ways of making decisions and of living life, the more I knew that I knew nothing. And if this was the case, then who am I? By giving voice to others, I got closer to my own voice.

The debate on how much a journalist can be objective is huge. We spent hours at university discussing this with very talented teachers who challenged us to think beyond and understand the self and our connections and interactions with others in many different ways. From religion to psychology, law, economics, society, cinema and the ethical code of journalism itself. Even now, I am only sure of one thing: I may have delivered the news as objectively as I possibly could but no one ever warned me that journalism itself had the power to transform me. That the reality of others, regardless of how objectively I approach it, would always have an affect on me. Those life changing questions are ones I, myself, may never be able to answer.

The people I wrote about became my therapists. They poked holes in the image that I had built around myself as a child and as a teenager. As a young responsible adult, learning and writing about their lives required me to make a lot of space in my soul and mind. I believed that to tell a good story, I had to open my heart to it first, in order to then be able to give voice to the unseen, unfelt and unheard.

For some time, I was pretty sure I was not a good journalist. That I did not have the guts nor what it took to be a good one. If I compared myself to other colleagues, I would always feel that I had too many boundaries when deciding how much of my wellbeing to risk for the sake of a story.

I sometimes thought I was not seen, felt and heard by the community. The figure of an international correspondent could only take one form: the fierce reporter. I never spend much time trying to explain myself. To some extent, I thought they would never understand the power that the stories of others had on me, nor why my value to journalism did not have to be linked to how far I was willing to go to tell the story.

Only now I am starting to hear some interesting talk around the notions of self-care and wellbeing in journalism. Before that, or at least during the years I was actively part of the profession, mindfulness would have meant being late to the story. Not being daring enough, brave enough. No one was there to take care of my mental health, neither could I access any support if I had needed it. So I decided to go only as far as I could safely go when pursuing certain stories, always putting my wellbeing first.

Me stepping out from Journalism became the confirmation that I was giving up because I couldn’t keep up. Which was kind of true, I burnt myself out. But not because I was unable to keep up, but because I could not find the space to tell stories in a way that I was seen, felt and heard. My life became a take it or leave it.

Long days starting work at midday and ending past midnight every single day. This was the only way to keep up with the time difference in Europe. As a freelancer, it also meant that I had to work hard to always be ready to deliver the news. If I started saying “No” to certain assignments, they would look for someone else who was available to write when they needed it.

My salary did not come from monthly wages, but from the total number of words I was able to write in a given month. The highest fee I got was €0.3per published word. If it was broadcasting, then I would be paid between €20 or €60 per piece, depending on the length. There were exceptions of more highly paid assignments, for sure. But generally, the fees were tight. The more stories I delivered, the higher my salary at the end of the month. Certainly, this was not the situation for all the international correspondents. Freelancers working on TV had higher fees. Although many of them also struggled. Senior journalists working for bigger media outlets had more stable livelihoods. I, and many other young journalists, we did not have the level of experience yet to gain better and more secure sources of income.

When I quit, I stopped writing for a few years. I had writer’s block. Nonetheless, stories kept haunting me. The only writing I was able to do was drafting life sketches about the realities around me. I was so grateful to my life in Asia! I needed to put into words everything that I was witnessing, learning and unpacking about my self and others. So as not to forget that, regardless of my painful break with journalism and what felt like a failure at giving voice to the life of others, I was still seeing, feeling and hearing the untold behind the told.

After Beijing, during my second stay in Hong Kong, the beautiful community of Sham Shui Po got me back to writing. This is the neighbourhood where I lived before I decided to move to London and left behind my life in Asia. This time around, I chose to write fiction to delve into the daily life of this kind and compassionate community who were seeing me, feeling me and hearing me. They took me into their lives as if I had always been part of it. Unknowingly, by doing so, they gave me a voice which, in turn, I used to give them voice. I immortalized a part of Hong Kong that I was afraid could disappear due to progress, gentrification, rampant modernisation and the influence of the Chinese Communist Party.

Sham Shui Po, Tai Nan Street.

Through the voice of my neighbours I rediscovered I was a storyteller that delved into the life of others by delving into my own. By questioning everything I knew, before writing about the life of others. With time I realised there was no other way for me to write than going deep into myself first. How else would I be able to see, feel and hear the others if I do not make the effort to at least try to see, feel and hear inside myself?

I admire and fully respect dear friends and journalists who risk it all for the purpose of the story. I don’t have this type of strength or bravery. And I am grateful to them for bringing to light stories that otherwise will always remain unseen, unfelt, unheard and untold because of the risks that it involves to obtain them. We all should, because reporters are human beings too. Some of them had been detained, harassed, almost kidnapped, shot at… the list is long. I suffered for their wellbeing and wished for them to come back safe, which they always did, thankfully. They came back in one piece, but I wondered to what extend their soul was intact, if they were silently broken. If their pain was unseen, unfelt and unheard. It felt like it did not matter much, as long as they kept delivering the news. As long as they kept giving voice to others.

I read once an inspiring book about Buddhism and how to deal with fear. Fear can take many shapes depending on what is triggering this painful and scary feeling. According to this Eastern philosophy, there is only one way to address it: through kindness and compassion, to ourselves and to others. Knowing that you have a voice, that you are seen, felt and heard is key to end the isolation that engulf us when we feel scared.

“When we see the suffering of the world, we feel much less alone, and our own suffering feels smaller already”, concludes the book by the Buddhist Monk and Peace activist Thich That Hanh.

Under this idea, the end of suffering becomes a collective aspiration. Alienating ourselves from the pain of others alienates us. Seeing, feeling and hearing the stories of others connects us to everything around us. It keeps us together, as one, in the quest of life.